Eric Adams is Mayor of NYC at least partly because New Yorkers got fed up with crime.

Adams, you see was a police captain. This suggested to people that he might be a bit less tolerant of criminals than…say…every other damn Democrat in the universe. He ran as a tougher-on-crime candidate and makes tough-on-crime noises.

But what, exactly, does being tough on crime mean to Adams? Not what you and I think it does.

New York, as with other Democrat-run cities, is experiencing a crime wave. Retail theft–shoplifting–has gone through the roof. Gangs of people go into stores and steal with impunity, leaving with thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. It is both organized crime and disorganized. Thousands of people engage in the practice, with hundreds at least who do it as a living.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams just unveiled his new plan to combat skyrocketing retail theft in the city.

These are not serious people. https://t.co/ovD5hT7APb pic.twitter.com/WCGai1CRHA

— AG (@AGHamilton29) May 20, 2023

Shoplifting has become a crisis in New York City, with recent numbers showing a 44 percent jump in incidents in 2022.

Mayor Adams says repeat offenders were behind a third of those thefts last year, and now he is rolling out a new plan to tackle the issue.

“250 people in 2023 have been arrested almost 2500 times, again, that’s 30 percent,” said Michael Lepetri, the NYPD’s Chief of Crime Control Strategies. “Who are these people: 52 percent are convicted felons.”

Those statistics are misleading, actually. The vast, vast majority of the people doing this are not kids stealing candy bars but repeat offenders. Adams is merely talking about the top 250 and of those only about arrests. Almost nobody gets arrested for shoplifting, and many many more are arrested fewer than 100 times each in 2023.

Imagine being arrested 100 times for anything in a year that is less than half over. That is almost once a day.

Still, this statistic is startling enough and does the job of showing that this is a huge problem, which I assume is his point.

Given the scale of the crisis, what does Adams’ “crackdown” look like? How is he going to reverse the decline in New York?

The new crackdown includes giving first-time offenders intervention programs instead of prosecution, de-escalation training for retail employees, establishing neighborhood retail watch groups to share information about a theft in real-time with one another and the police, and installing kiosks in stores to connect would-be thieves with social service programs.

That, certainly, will stop the crime wave cold.

Kiosks offering social service programs. Neighborhood groups to watch the crime happen–nobody, after all, is authorized or encouraged to interfere. We all know what interfering with a crime will get the good samaritan: time in Riker’s.

De-escalation training? Now that is funny. Expect to wind up on YouTube being smeared as a White Supremacist for not allowing yourself to be victimized. Oh..you don’t have to imagine it. It happens, and the MSM and the Left work overtime to destroy you.

City Hall came up with this plan after the Mayor held a summit last December that included small business representatives, large retail groups, law enforcement, and union leaders

It took 6 months to come up with this plan.

Six months.

What is the point? When the tough-on-crime ex-cop suggests that kiosks with social service information are the solution to an ongoing crime wave, there really isn’t a point in sticking around. Pick up and leave.